Romantic geographies - Amanda Gilroy

This work focuses on the geographical construction of people and places in late 18th- and early 19th century travel writings. As the essays demonstrate, romantic travellers went to warzones and imperial frontiers; the reported on hotels and health spas; their concerns included ethnography, medicine, politics and aesthetics. Whether undertaking the Grand Tour of Europe or travelling to America, India or Scandinavia, travellers often sought to cross more than national boundaries: their accounts invite an explicitly materialist criticism that engages with transgressions of national, racial, gender, class and generic boundaries. Scholars in the fields of Romanticism and Romantic travel draw on a range of historicist approaches, especially feminist and post-colonial, to examine the politics of location in writings that range from Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth to Francis Wilford and Priscilla Wakefield. They contribute to debates about Romanticism and cultural power and provide a critical map of the quickly expanding area of Romantic travel.